Of Poetry, Gods, Heroes & Mortal Things // Carlos

The Greek gods are a matter of poetry. First, we know of them through the verses of various Ancient Greek poets; eventually poet-philosophers, but poets in any event. Secondly, their very presence – ultimately, their very being – makes sense in poetic terms alone. In other words: talking of the gods meant in Ancient Greece assuming a poetic way of speaking.

Let’s take two examples from Homer. In Iliad 1.210, Achilles refrains from attacking Agamemnon who has offended him: advised by Athena, he puts his sword back prudently. In Iliad 22.224-5, Achilles announces to Hector that he will die, because, he says, Athena will kill Hector by means of his (i.e. Achilles’s own) spear.

In both cases, the goddess appears in the moment of the action – as she who carries it out. Why? Because the Greek gods are the eternal or ever-living forces of the world. Unlike the Christian god, they are not transcendent but immanent in the world – better, they are the world. Love, war, beauty, victory, clear thought, the sea, the sky… these are the elements out of which the world is made, their constitutive forces, and they are personified as gods and goddesses.

Question: What does one need to be able to control an impulse and thus avoid the unwanted consequences of an action that therefore demands to be interrupted? Clear thought. What does one need in a duel to triumph over one’s adversary? Clear thought, as well. And what is Athena (born as she is from Zeus’s forehead) but the poetic personification of clear thought? The difference between the Ancient Greeks and us is that, whereas we would say: “I thought for a second and realised that I should not confront him after all,” and: “I am wiser and quicker than you, so I will defeat you!,“ they (the Greeks) used to say instead: “Athena wisely told me that I should not confront him,” and: “Athena with her wisdom will help me to vanquish you!”

Put differently: we no longer speak in poetic terms. Yet the Ancient Greeks did… even when they merely had to list down weapons (like in Mycenaean Pylos) or to catalogue ships (like in Iliad 2).

We must now formulate a key question. Are the Greek gods less then – in comparison to the Judæo-Christian god, that is – due to their poetic being? By no means! In fact they are more, not less – much more indeed. It could be interesting to recall here Gœthe’s words: poetry is not a supplement to ordinary language, something added to it as an ornament that we can just as well dispense with, but the true language – the language of truth, as we shall immediately see – that we impoverish, and betray, when we speak in an ordinary fashion.

What does this mean?

To understand it, we must bracket any notion of truth we may have. Because, for us, truth is only three things. It is the faithful correspondence that needs to exist between words and things (we say that the statement: “the cat is on the mat” is true if there is a cat on a mat, otherwise we do not hesitate to declare it false). It is also the logical correctness that must preside over any judgement (we can not say “two plus two equals twenty two, therefore, all whales are mammals,” as none of this makes any sense). Lastly, it is what we take to be the norm in a given domain of knowledge (“additions and divisions are different types of mathematical operations,” “there is no democracy without division of powers,” etc.).

These notions of truth are with us since Aristotle. But before him, truth had for the Ancient Greeks another meaning we seem to have forgotten about (as Heidegger says). The word they used and that we translate as “truth” is one which does not point to any adequacy, correctness, or norm. For these three are juridical notions of truth, in the sense that they demand something like a verdict (“this true!,” “this false!”). Yet the Ancient-Greek word for “truth” has instead poetic overtones. This word is ἀλήθεια (aletheia), which, furthermore, Parmenides depicts in his poem as a “goddess” – the “goddess (of) truth.”

What does ἀλήθεια mean? It is a word with two components: a negative prefix (a-) that we can translate as “dis-“ or “un-“ followed by a noun that means “closure,” “veiling,” “concealment.” Hence one should render ἀλήθεια as “dis-closure,” “un-veiling,” “un-concealment.” Truth as disclosure, then. But what kind of disclosure? The kind of disclosure or unveiling that allows the ever-living to become apparent (patent, manifest) under the particular and the ephemeral. Truth, then, is the unveiling of the eternal or ever-living in what is mortal. Saying, therefore, “Athena (that is, clear thought) helped me,” amounts to acknowledge the presence of an ever-living force (Athena) within the ephemeral (me). And it also amounts to chant it, thus paying it due honour.

This is why in Ancient Greece poetry is also the very language of truth – and, at the same time, the language that allows the gods (and the goddesses) to come forth in the realm of speech, thereby helping us to pay tribute in this way to their presence. For in Ancient Greece the gods are experienced, never believed in. One cannot be asked to believe in the ever-living forces and elements that constitute the world (this world, while it lasts…). Only extra-cosmic gods require that we believe in them. Immanent gods are experienced. One does not relate to them in terms of belief. As Walter Otto provokingly says, you only start believing in the gods once they are gone, once you no-longer experience them. 

Poetry, then, allowed the Ancient Greeks to pay tribute to the gods, to the presence of the ever-living in the ephemeral. Put differently: poetry was for them a sacred enterprise. But are the immortal gods in need of mortal poetry? If they are already present in the world, do they need to be sung by us? In one sense they do not, since human songs add nothing to their being. But in another sense they do. They do as long as we, mortals, are part of this world. Why? Because we tend to forget them, and when we do so (when we dream, for instance, that we are in the image of a transcendent god), the world becomes a set of resources we appropriate, use, and benefit from. Just look around and see the unworld into which the world has been turned since the gods (the Greek gods or any other immanent gods) are no longer remembered.

Now, in German, the “sacred” (Heilige) is also that which heals (notice the phonetic resemblance between the German heil- and the English heal-). This semantic equation invites us, therefore, to rethink the sacred in capitalist ruins, or at the end-point of modernity – the end-point in which we are. For our devastated world cannot take anything else any longer. In short, then, we need the gods to return and to heal us(*).

We also need them back because mortal things demand care, and singing to the eternally-living present in what is mortal – present in the form of beauty or sadness, or both – is the only way to keep what is mortal alive or disclosed in the realm of light before it dies thus falling back into darkness. For as Pindar says, “things need someone who chants them so as not to lapse into oblivion and death”(**).

Lastly, the Ancient-Greek heroic ethos is also intrinsically connected to this. The Homeric heroes fight for fame (or glory). But the latter is said in two different ways in Greek: κῦδος (kudos) and κλέος (kleos). Kudos is the fame one achieves when one wins a combat. Kleos, the everlasting fame that results from being remembered. “Let’s go and reach our kleos or else summit to someone else’s kleos, so as to take part in something worthy of being remembered,” say the heroes in the Iliad. For as Hölderlin hast it, “what lasts is established by the poets.”

In short, the poem heals/saves what is mortal – be it something or someone – from death. In fact there is, for the living, no other possible salvation – how could there be? Mortals are defined by their mortality, they can only last despite their dying… but while dying.  

It is most remarkable, in this sense, the way in which Heraclitus plays with the images of the “bow” and the “lyre”: “They do not realise that what differs agrees with itself: back-bent attunement, like that of the bow and the lyre,” he writes (fr. 51). Nobody seems to have noticed it, but he is talking precisely of poetry and of the prolonged life (symbolised by the lyre) that poetry confers to the mortal at the doors of death (which is symbolised by the bow) – and hence speaking of truth in terms of aletheia (***). 

Captivated by fr. 51 of Heraclitus (on which you can read more here), Hölderlin sees this tensional unity of life and death very well, and has his Empedocles say right before suiciding by throwing himself into the Etna, a volcano, to show his people that they have fatally turned away from nature:

O Iris Bogen über stürzenden

Gewässern, wenn die Woog in Silberwolken

Auffliegt, wie du bist, so ist meine Freude(****).

In my translation:

O rainbow over the tumbling

Waters, when the wave in silver clouds

Takes off, like you are, so is my happiness.

The rainbow echoes the form of the bow and the lyre. The ascending movement of the wave and its foam is contrasted with the descending movement of the water. While Empedocles’s happiness consists in the back-bent coincidence of these two diverging forces.

In this case, the poem (that is, Hölderlin’s Empedocles) has to do with the opposition that may also exist between the ever-living (or immortal) and the particular (or mortal). This is what Ancient Greek tragedy was mostly about. The death of the tragic hero serves in it to underline the power of that which is universal and immortal, which s/he feels as destiny while everyone else only views things in a narrow, superficial way. That is why the tragic hero is an example of human greatness. Antigone’s defence of the eternal laws of the dead against the laws of the polis is a good illustration of this, as also is Medea’s resolution, on which I have written elsewhere.

Hölderlin aks: “Why poets in times of dearth?” The response is easy to infer from what I have written here.

Further reading: Walter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion

(*) Crucial as it may be today, this, however, is anything but a new claim. The early German Romantics made of it their banner at the turn of the 19th century, which explains their interest in ancient mythology. While most Anglo-American intellectuals promoted individualism, utilitarianism, evolutionism, and capitalism, and the French revolutionaries inspired the struggle for social justice (that is, socialism whatever its form), the early German Romantics dreamt with the reassessment of myth and poetry. The fact that, more than one hundred years afterwards, the Nazis, in an different context, usurped a number of their ideals, has led many to dismiss these as irrational, and to think that there are only two ways of positioning ourselves vis-à-vis the world: legitimising capitalism or fighting against it in merely political terms. For an assessment of these issues, see further Neil Gregor (ed.), Nazism (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 59-62, and George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 55, 73.

(**) Think, for instance, in how a Japanese haiku (short poem) allows, say, the myst of the night to subtly invade a room by evoking the glimmering of the moonlight on the skin of a tiny frog sitting on the windowsill… The view that linguistic apprehension of any kind amounts to spoil reality’s sensuality and to imprison it within the boundaries of human reason, is too simplistic a view, therefore.

(***) Plausibly, against Parmenides’s circumscription of the latter to the non-changing.

(****) Hölderlin, Empedocles, 1st version (1798), Act II, Scene 6, in fine. 

Elke Rehder, Der Vulkan Ätna. Friedrich Hölderlin – Empedokles (2001)